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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   2784 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 15, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So what are you reading?

Working on my annual re-read of Battle Cry of Freedom and staring the Stormlight Archive.

Just finished Stormlight and really enjoyed it. Yes, people will point out stylistic/prose issues, and they'll be absolutely right. But Wind and Truth succeeded as the plate-spinning, world-expanding, every-new-detail-an-entire-sequel-hook kind of book I was looking for.

For something completely different, I'm alternating back to Annals of the Former World, a set of geology essays. I mentioned the first one last year, but apparently never commented on the next two, so here we go:

In Suspect Terrain was a hit piece on plate tectonics. Great premise, slightly confusing execution, because it was really more like a series of reasonable objections to people in the "new theory" hype cycle. I can't tell if that means the main character was stating the obvious, or if she really was a visionary who was vindicated in the next 40 years of textbooks. The coolest part was that, yes, plate tectonics was new in the 50s and 60s. I always kind of assumed it was settled in the 1800s like so much fossil and timeline stuff.

Rising from the Plains, though, was amazing. It's a history of one family stretching back to the westward expansion into Wyoming. At the same time, it's a narrative of how the Laramie and Medicine Bow mountains got where they are today. Outrageous cowboy anecdotes share pages with the solemn march of Deep Time. Part of the charm was having to keep a map open to cross-reference. I highly recommend this one.

Anyway, the next essay up is Assembling California. So far he seems to be coming at the region from both the western fault lines and the eastern Sierra Nevada. As always, the prose has been delightful. Here's hoping it keeps up.

Schopenhauer "Essays and Aphorisms"

Making my way through "Suicide of the West" ,a 1962 book by James Burnham. It's a book about liberalism, or more specifically 'liberal syndrome' - Burnham doesn't think liberalism is coherent enough to be called an ideology.

The book aged very well, perhaps the only exception is that back then liberals were typically for freedom of speech for communists -Burnham was basically cancelled for supporting McCarthy, presumably because as a CIA connected guy he knew more than the average left-winger.

Now it's generally true that they're usually soft on islamists.

The Ionian Mission.

Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin return to Mediterranean for the first time in something like 6 books in a Temu Ship of the Line.

Will Stephen finally get ganked by French Intelligence? Will Aubrey get any on the side? Will they run out of Plum Duff? Let's find out!

Man I'm still on book 3 but eager to catch up.

You're in for a treat.

A third of the way through the Divine Cities Trilogy. It's pretty good so far, the worldbuilding is interesting at first, not a ton of depth but hey, the writing is good and the plots are fun.

Finished my reading sample of Ninti's Gate, and ended up not buying the book. Pierce seems to have attempted a show-don't-tell approach to worldbuilding and characterization, but ended up moving the plot along too fast. The characters' motivations were completely opaque and the action made no sense.

So I'm still re-reading The Worm Ourobouros. I dunno why. Maybe the pretentious language gets me. Maybe I'm just a sucker of chivalric romance. I don't regret it.

Also picked up the Cyropaedia, but taking it slow.

Started on Dresden Files. I watched the one-season series and liked it, so decided to try out the books. So far Storm Front wasn't bad, and Fool Moon is fine too. I wonder why they couldn't make a decent longer-running TV show out of it - the story and the setup is very cinematographic. Since there's a lot of book in the series I will probably return to it from time to time for a while.

I'd say that the TV series was limited by what was possible at the time, more than anything else. More specifically, I don't know how much better the source material could have been treated for a modestly budgeted SyFy series. I think that Netflix or Prime could potentially do a much better job with it these days but, of course, they'd be just as likely to screw it all up for Reasons if they tried, alas.

I'll be interested to hear what you think of the series if/when you return to it. FWIW, while I know that Butcher himself has said something to the effect that the first four books are completely skippable, it was the third book that set the hook for me as a reader. Where the first two felt to me like they were more mid-level urban fantasy fare that weren't necessarily too serious, shit got real in Grave Peril, and IMO it hasn't stopped since. While there are plenty of folks that have been upset by this twist or that turn in the overall series, I'm not one of them. There have been many deeply touching moments in the series for me, more than any other that I've yet read, and some of them are made that much better by being brought to fruition over the span of several or even many books. Even the seemingly-slightest rhetorical flourishes can be pregnant with foreshadowing, and I personally think that Butcher has just gotten better and better as a writer as he's cranked them out, with Ghost Story being my personal favorite.

Where the first two felt to me like they were more mid-level urban fantasy fare

Yes, I agree more or less. "Mid-level" sometimes taken as damning with faint praise, but here I think it's appropriate and not negative - I mean he's not spectacular so far, but decent and enjoyable fare. Based on what you say, I'll probably get to Grave Peril sooner than I otherwise planned, thanks.

Based on what you say, I'll probably get to Grave Peril sooner than I otherwise planned, thanks.

I agree with @Muninn that the first two books are just OK. Book 3, for me, is where the series really grabbed me as something special. And from there on out he keeps that high level of quality pretty consistently.

HPMOR. I'm just past the troll fight.

I have never planned to do this (since I haven't read the original books), but somehow, I ended up on its webpage and decided to give it a try.

It's... not what I expected. I kinda expected a "Harry Potter pokes holes in or abuses the laws of magic while being an insufferable little shit about it" and there were chapters like that, but that's not what the book is about. It's not "sequences for the fans of HP", even though there are chapters like that. The quality is kinda uneven, too. The whole SPHEW arc felt like filler, for example, especially after the Azkaban arc that preceded it.

What's surprising is how much of a capital P progressive EY is, up there with Paine, Marx, Pinker, etc in his conviction. It's not this surprising when you think about it, it's the Motte that has been warped by its interest in the culture war too much.

What's funny is that back when the chapters were being released live, people used to complain when it got far afield of "Harry Potter pokes holes in or abuses the laws of magic", as many seemed to genuinely expect that the series would end with Harry discovering the source of all magic and using that to become God or somesuch.

Also, the reveal of Quirrell's true identity caught a lot of people off guard.

There's maybe a fair critique there, the series starts to get REALLY BIG in the scope of its ideas when you're past the midpoint, and brings in a lot of characters and implies a LOT going on... then as it comes in for a landing the plot has a laser focus on the few main characters. And then the somewhat unfortunate message, which is all but outright stated in the last couple chapters is: "Only about a dozen people in the WHOLE WORLD are capable of making any real difference in the grand scheme of things."

So people who came in hoping for Harry to break everything were let down... and yet there's literally no doubt at the end of the book that Harry is the most important person in history™. Which isn't a knock against the plot, but looking back its pretty on-the-nose as to how EY and perhaps other rationalists view themselves.

Also, the reveal of Quirrell's true identity caught a lot of people off guard.

Seriously? I haven't even read the original books, but wasn't that, like, the plot twist of the first volume?

It was! Which may have been why people expected him to subvert it.

Yudkowsky said he thought it was blatantly obvious as soon as we found out that, e.g. Quirrell and Voldemort (by Quirrel's own admission!) were trained in the same martial arts dojo by the same teacher.

But I think many people (myself included, I guess) were expecting some kind of clever double-twist to be revealed later.

I think using power word: kill on the jailer and explaining it away as expecting him to dodge it was the stage when it became obvious who the BBEG was, especially given EY's strong views on harm.

Didn't he explain that in parseltongue, which is the language that allegedly prevents the speaker from lying.

Of course, the reflexive reliance on the killing curse is indicative enough on its own.

Oh, I also remember that my other theory was that Harry himself had been specifically confunded to be unable to make any direct observations about Quirrel's true nature, which is why he was seemingly unable to make basic reasoning/connections about the guy even as evidence mounted.

And then there's a moment in Chapter 104, right before the finale pops off for real:

"Wait!" Harry blurted.

The Potions Master's hand hovered about his robes. "Why?" said the Potions Master.

"I... I just think you probably shouldn't call them..."

In a blur, the Potions Master's wand was in his hand. "Nullus confundio!" A black jet darted out and hit Harry, striking in the direction Harry had already started to evade. There followed four other spells, containing words like Polyfluis and Metamorphus; and for those Harry politely stood still.

Snape literally hit him with a spell for dispelling confusion caused by another spell, and then SHORTLY THEREAFTER (mere minutes later) Harry puts together the entire puzzle of Quirrel's role in everything.

Just really interesting timing, that.

I think EY intended Harry's issue seeing Quirrel for evil as an example of a massive failure mode for rationalists (I really don't want this thing to be true so I will purposefully avoid accepting information that would make me update that way). But it also makes sense that Quirrelmort might take the extra precaution of screwing up Harry's thought processes just enough to avoid catching on too quickly.

But Quirrell can't cast spells on Harry. That's the whole narrative reason why the resonance mechanic exists; if Quirrell can just confound Harry or erase his memories, the plot becomes unsolvable.

Not quiiiiite true.

The actual solution to the final exam involved Harry casting a spell directly on Quirrell, for example. If the spell effect were small enough I'd guess its something that he could actually do without triggering a major problem, OR he could have someone else do it for him, which is his MO for almost all the other stuff he pulls outside of the Azkaban rescue.

And Quirrell's initial motivation was to create a worthy opponent to play with so he wouldn't be bored in eternal immortality. And that only changed once he learned of a Prophesy that would DIRECTLY threaten that immortality, with Harry being the trigger.

Adjusting Harry's thinking so that he wouldn't discover Quirrell's secret before Quirrell had won him over is well within bounds of that motivation.

Yudkowsky wrote a whole author's note about how obvious he thought it was and how he didn't know how to make it any clearer:

Since many reviewers are still asking if Quirrell is Voldemort, I tried putting in a final sentence from "Professor Quirrell's" point-of-view and got such reader outrage at the unsubtlety that I gave up and removed it. I am now seriously asking for help and suggestions on what I can do to make it clear to all readers that Professor Quirrell is Voldemort. So far we have the following facts:

  1. canon!Tom Riddle applied to teach Defense at Hogwarts and put a curse on the position when he didn't get it.
  2. canon!Quirrell is possessed by Voldemort.
  3. It has been repeated within the fic that the Dark Lord has lost his last body but is somehow still alive.
  4. The author has summarized the First Law of Fanfiction as "Frodo gets lightsaber, Sauron gets Death Star".
  5. The Defense Professor at Hogwarts is
    5a) A drooling zombie
    5b) Who occasionally undergoes a drastic shift of personality and
    5c) Becomes a genius who
    5d) Loves the spell Avada Kedavra and
    5e) Is extraordinarily knowledgeable about Battle Magic and
    5f) Talks about how he always wanted to teach Defense at Hogwarts and
    5g) Wanted to be a Dark Lord when he was a young Slytherin and made a list of all the mistakes he would never make and
    5h) Talks about "pretending to lose", which he learned through a horribly humiliating experience in a martial arts monastery which was wiped out by Lord Voldemort shortly thereafter, except for one student who was a friend of his and
    5i) Doesn't seem to understand why Harry wouldn't want to become a Dark Lord and
    5j) Talks about how much he hates this flawed world and
    5k) Has manipulated Harry into disliking Dumbledore and
    5l) Thinks that when Harry knows him a little better, Harry will deduce that he would want to cast a spell on the Pioneer 11 plaque which will "make it last a lot longer"

The reader is supposed to know at this point that PQ is LV. How can I make it clearer without it being disruptive? If you have ideas, please share them.

I think the only way to make it 'clearer' was to not make the whole fanfic explicitly about disrupting the canon set up by Rowling in every way possible.

That is, its still pretty possible that there was an incompetent Lord Voldemort who got destroyed by the combined might of the good wizards...

AND there's a vastly more competent dark wizard who isn't blatantly evil but is definitely running machinations in the background that are far and beyond what Voldemort could achieve, whilst having nothing to do with voldemort.

I guess the one factor I didn't see right away is the why, as to why a supergenius wizard with demigod-level powers would want to adopt that persona for long periods of time. That came out later.

But yeah, he practically bashed people over the head with clues.

The entire HPMoR is Harry's first year, which is the first volume of the original septalogy.

Just finished reading the first Volume of The chemical Formulary, a book which is best described as "What if the Necronomicon were real"

It's got all sorts of recipes from adhesives to cosmetics to explosives to (insanely sketchy) medicine. It also presents everything in a mater of fact way without telling you of all the demons you are possibly creating.

Here's the recipie for cleaning coins for example

Sodium Cyanide 8 ounces

Water 1 Gallon

Apply the above solution with a tampico brush and when tarnish is removed wash with cold clean water then hot water and dry.

Note: this material is Poisonous and care must be taken in handling.

When this book says something is dangerous what they mean is this has a level 4 safety risk in the data sheet cleaning coins just requires enough cyanide to kill 2000 people

In volume 6 they have a Defense against war gasses section on page 535.

The describe Titanium Tetracloride smoke as "harmless", and Zinc Chloride smoke gets the same treatment

Yeah that's right this book is that unhinged.

It's also got great recipes for making Hydrogen Sulfide gas, a chemical that if it reaches 1000 parts per million and you take 1 breathful you die instantly.

This book is both a gold mine and a walking disaster. The funny thing is most of the chemicals used in the recipes are super easy to purchase at your local hardware store or wal-mart. Then you can light your house on fire, give your neighborhood cancer, die of Cyanide poisoning (ok that one is harder), die of hydrogen sulfide poisoning. Some of the stuff is harder to make thankfully but the danger levels of this book rival removing a microwave transformer.

Adding Political Ponerology to my list.

Finished Cryptonomicon. 5/5. Neil Stephenson has an interesting approach to relationships and sex. It stands out a bit because many books that feel like this (and Anathem) just skip them entirely. I think Cryptonomicon did a better job overall.

As I read it I thought "this is great but it was clearly written just a couple of years ago" given it's references to crypto currency. No - 1999. Amazing.

I lust, I yearn, I ACHE for late 90s hackerdom like you wouldn't believe. Two pieces of art have sparked my imagination in a way to have made me wish I was born 10 years earlier or smarter: this and the movie Primer. Halt and Catch Fire not bad either.

I also have some simple, base pleasures that I know are bad for me. The Japanese being wrecked in WWII is one of those things, and so that was an unexpected and happy bit of catharsis.

Now digging into Circe which has also been excellent so far!

I can thank Neal for the blessing and the curse of knowing about Van Eck phreaking.

If Cryptonomicon tickled your fancy, check out Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, a trilogy which utilizes the same sort of parallel story lines.

I feel the yearn for 90s hackerdom also. Assuming you’ve also read Snowcrash, what about Neuromancer? Gibson really builds that dystopian cyberpunk world so well.

Like No_One, I really enjoyed both Snowcrash and Neuromancer but did find they were a bit heavily stylized for my taste.

Claude suggests both Altered Carbon and The Windup Girl - both of which I've read and think are less 90s style but share some elements of the sub-genre. Both very good!

I read Gibson-Neuromancer and a related book but didn't like it. All style, no substance.

About a hundred pages into my second read of Unsong. I previously read a print-on-demand edition of the web serial version, but when Scott announced an official print edition with some significant edits, I bought a copy. So far, the edits seem fairly mild: everything I liked and disliked about the version I previously read seems to have survived intact. The Kabbalah stuff is great, the alternate history stuff is great, the intensely literal-minded apophenia-laden interpretations of passages from the Torah and Talmud are great - but the glurgey interactions between the protagonist and his MPDG "t3h penguin of doooom!!" love interest positively make my skin crawl.

Just finished my first read.

I enjoyed it a lot, and a lot more than I was expecting. I went in pretty much blind other than having read Scott's blog, so I wasn't expecting so much humour, and the rationalist/utilitarian references that I assumed would be present were thankfully reasonably scarce and understated. I think my favourite part was Dylan Alvarez's entrance and the idea of placebomancy.

I'm not much of a fantasy reader but this one pulled in a lot of the parts I can enjoy (a bit of Ted Chiang, a bit of Douglas Adams, a bit of Terry Pratchett) and left out almost all the parts that totally put me off fantasy writing (excessive and self-indulgent world building and lore). The last fantasy book I read was the Northern Lights trilogy which was trope heavy YA shite.

My only grumble was that after such a good book the ending was only "good enough", but good enough is good enough.

Yeah, the ending feels a lot like Alan Moore's Promethea (or, tbf, a lot of Douglas Adam's works, like the Dirk Gently books). There's an absolute ton of pins that were lined up, and then the bowling ball never really came, so they fell over anyway. Which is praising with faint damns when it all still comes together! But feels like something that could have been improved in the editing pass since initial release.

I wish Anna was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. A Manic Pixie Dream Girl fucks you. Anna is just a bitch.

But the biggest problem with Unsong is that Aaron is a pussy. He is not brave or manly. He has very little agency; things happen to him. By the end of the story, he has become an observer to the Cometspawn, who are the ones actually moving the plot forward. He's got yandere Buffy throwing herself at him and he still holds out for Ms. Lets-just-be-friends. This is someone else's story; Aaron is just along for the ride.

The second biggest problem with Unsong is that Scott has disease of MCU writer; he cannot stop making jokes, even during serious moments, which completely ruins the dramatic tension.

Other problems: Schizophrenic narrative structure that constantly jumps between past and present story threads involving completely different characters and locations, Kabbalism is a lackluster magic system.

Still, I think Unsong has a lot of really cool ideas (the Comet King is fucking awesome). There is the core of a good story there, even if the execution is badly flawed. I think if you gave it to a more talented rational fiction author to rewrite, like Eliezer Yudkowsky or Alexander Wales, you would get something truly wonderful.

The second biggest problem with Unsong is that Scott has disease of MCU writer; he cannot stop making jokes, even during serious moments, which completely ruins the dramatic tension.

Yes, thank you, you put it into words. No accident that the protagonist names his laptop after the Buffy the Vampire Slayer desktop that adorns it, so much of the dialogue has that "quippy" Whedon quality I find so grating. "Wouldn't it be funny if Christian archangels communicated like annoying teenagers on Tumblr?" Not especially, Scott, no.

Schizophrenic narrative structure that constantly jumps between past and present story threads involving completely different characters and locations

I actually don't mind this too much, I think it contributes to the sense of the fictional universe being huge and epic in scope. Although perhaps it might have been a bit less disorienting if there had been two chapters in the present-day A-story, then jumping back in time to provide backstory, then jumping back to the A-story for two more chapters etc.

Fortune's Envoy (Cyber Dreams book 3) by Plum Parrot. I started the first one after finishing Daring and I'm still way into it!

I’m also working through the first book in Stormlight Archive! I’m alternating between that, Hegel And The Hermetic Tradition, and a book about the basics of Freemasonry.

Stop at the third. It goes downhill from there.

I think this is bad advice. First, because that is not generally agreed upon (the fourth book is excellent in my view), but second because if you read three doorstopper fantasy novels you're not going to stop there. Pretty much anyone who enjoys them enough to get that far is going to keep going to see how they like the books they were advised against. Third, it would be extremely frustrating to get only 30% of a story. Better to not read the books at all if they really do go downhill to such an extent.

That is not quite true. if I tell you to read the wheel of time up to book six (if we are generous) and then jump directly to the gathering storm will I be giving bad advice? If I say to stop reading dune after the messiah/children/god emperor - is it bad advice? Or witcher after the second.

Brandon Sanderson has enough time to get back on track and fix things. Series do have ups and downs. Fourth was total slog to read - you could remove 3/4ths of the book and improve it. And the fifth was both weird and the big secrets revealed and payoffs of mysteries were ... meh at best. And let's not start at the ending. The fifth was cringe in everything but the adolin parts. And even there was substantially weaker than similarly themed Coltaine's chain of dogs.

That is not quite true. if I tell you to read the wheel of time up to book six (if we are generous) and then jump directly to the gathering storm will I be giving bad advice?

Yes, because the entire series is great. Books nine and ten are some of the best material in the series in fact.

Fourth was total slog to read - you could remove 3/4ths of the book and improve it.

No way man. The fourth book was one of the best in the series. The Navani scenes alone made that book riveting and well worth reading, let alone the other good stuff on top of that.

And the fifth was both weird and the big secrets revealed and payoffs of mysteries were ... meh at best. And let's not start at the ending. The fifth was cringe in everything but the adolin parts. And even there was substantially weaker than similarly themed Coltaine's chain of dogs.

The fifth book has issues (I've touched on them before), but it still was decent. If Sanderson keeps putting out books that have the same issues as the fifth has, then I'll be more concerned. But for right now it's one single aberration in a series which has otherwise been uniformly excellent.

Yes, because the entire series is great. Books nine and ten are some of the best material in the series in fact.

You really think Crossroads of Twilight is one of the best books in the series?

Yes! I will grant you that the Perrin chapters are a slog (as they are through that whole region of the series), but the Mat/Tuon chapters are peak Wheel of Time. Honestly one of my favorite parts of the series because of that.

Better to not read the books at all if they really do go downhill to such an extent.

I agree with this. Read the Mistborn trilogy instead, @Lizzardspawn. You get a full story, still set in the Sanderson world, in a tight package.

The first two are solid adventure fantasy. Starting in 3 and really picking up in 4, it delves into this horrible amateur philosophy that just guts the life out of the entire world and concept.

Books 1 and 2 are really two parts of what should have been one, big, book. Books 3, 4, and 5 are the remnants of what should have been a good trilogy, with some fantastic moments that just don't hold together well enough.

The one-backstory-character-per-book would have actually worked if it were a trilogy. It really let me down in books 4 and 5.

I disagree. Like I said, I thought book 4 was excellent (I would say it's my second favorite behind Words of Radiance). Which is why I'm saying there isn't really agreement on this point, so it would be more accurate to advise new readers "I don't really care for the books after this point, but many people still like them, so you may or may not find it enjoyable".

Interested to hear your thoughts on Stormlight. I don't think I'm going to like it, but I promised my friend group I would read at least the first book.

So far I think it’s… okay. I still don’t feel like I have a strong grasp of the setting, and I especially don’t really understand how the “spren” are supposed to work. Seems like they would make it extremely difficult for anybody to ever conceal their emotions, and so far I haven’t seen any suggestion of how social relations in the setting are different from those in our world as a result. The action scenes thus far have been sufficiently exciting, and I’m intrigued enough by certain plot threads to make it worth continuing with the book.

The spren are shinto spirits, or sentient ideas and thoughts. They're part faerie, part ghost, part imagination made manifest.

Right, I understand that much, I just don’t understand what their existence is supposed to imply about social relations on this continent. Are people able to suppress the appearance of spren related to an emotion they’re currently feeling but would like to conceal? Can actors cause spren to appear which outwardly indicate the appearance of a particular emotion, even when the actor is not authentically experiencing that emotion internally? Maybe some of these things get explored later in the series, but for right now they just seem like a weird decoration or curiosity.

Are people able to suppress the appearance of spren related to an emotion they’re currently feeling but would like to conceal?

To some extent. This does get explored in the series (for example, a character going undercover who has to try to not draw fearspren). It seems to be that the main thing is how strongly you feel the emotion, so not drawing spren is a matter of trying to keep your emotions calm. I would say the books don't get as deep as you might like, but they do give some consideration to how the existence of emotionspren affect the world.

The emotion related spren (as opposed to wind etc.) are mostly gloryspren, creationspren, fearspren etc. and I think they are generally attracted to emotion when it's expressed strongly enough that it's hard to hide. In practice the questions you raise don't seem to come up. There are spren related to lying and things you might want to hide but a) they're not around much for reasons and b) they're good at hiding! The nature of spren is explored more later but not really their effects on society - they're bottom feeders reacting to currents, not integrated into those currents per se.

Can actors cause spren to appear which outwardly indicate the appearance of a particular emotion, even when the actor is not authentically experiencing that emotion internally?

No, I don't think so.

Mild spoilers (I believe it is mentioned in the first or second book, and confirmed in 3): There are locations where the spren won’t show up, even if people are feeling the emotions.

For help with the setting, Sanderson was inspired by rock pools at a beach he visited, which is why almost everywhere is rocky or sandy, most creatures have crustacean features, and 'grass' and other plants act weird.

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